If you truly want to setup a Family website to post pictures of the family, etc... .Mac is the best way since it integrates with iPhoto/iMovie very well. However, this is my 2nd subscription to .Mac and I find it almost useless (one subscription when it first came out, one now).

It has been worth it for me, especially for iDisk (now 1 GB) and synchronizing bookmarks, addresses, etc. One thing I wish were possible would be to separately password-protect different folders and subfolders on your iDisk. I could use this for allowing different client access to data. Right now it's either on or off for the whole thing, which isn't very flexible.

It depends on what you expect to do with it. My wife and I have .Mac, and feel that it's just barely worth the money (therefore we just renewed earlier this month). We both use the email accounts (hers is an added email-only account), I upload pictures via iPhoto, sync data between the two Macs, and upload certain important files for offsite backup (using an encrypted disk image so nobody at Apple can snoop my stuff!).

We haven't looked into the new groups feature yet (might be nice for communicating with family?), and we don't use the bundled Backup application only because I'm very technical and like to do it my own way.

.Mac is definitely not for everyone. Free email with more storage is easy to find (Yahoo, Gmail, etc), and sites like Yahoo do also offer picture uploading and group features for free. The key for me is the integration with Mac OS X.

I particularly like the iPhoto integration for uploading new pictures. As I said, I'm very technical, and I used to do all my photo web pages myself. I had unix perl scripts to resize the images, generate thumbnails, and create a basic html template that I'd go in and edit. But all said, it still might take me 30-45 minutes to put up a roll of 30 digital pictures. With iPhoto, it takes about 5 minutes. Even though I have much less control over the final product, it looks good and the time savings is huge for me. And one great thing about iDisk access is that I can go in and edit the generated html if I want to tweak it.

I do wish they'd provide more themes for picture pages - the ones they have are good, but for $100/year I'd like to see more.

They've offered some nice .Mac-only downloads in the past - a few cool utilities and application add-ons, but it seems like the frequency of these has gone down. Again, would be nice if they'd provide a bit more in this department.

All in all, I can't say that it's an amazing value, but again we feel that it's just about worth the $100/year, so we've stuck with it. Though in reality it's a bit less, as we usually buy the .Mac box from Amazon.com when renewing, which is usually about $78 or so.

Depends, I love the ability to sync my address book, calendar, and bookmarks because I normally use 3 different Macs throughout the day. For your situation, dunno, try the 60 day trial and see what you think.

I think it is worth it for people who have multiple macs and synch with .mac. It also may be worth it if you want to post videos for others to see.

Otherwise, no, in my opinion. With Gmail, flickr (with the uploader tool on your desktop you can drag n/ drop from iphoto), yahoo groups and blogger (particularly since the google takeover) can do 95% of what .mac can do for free.

I see no benefit in .Mac. I have my own website hosting which is very good, cheaper than .Mac and has unlimited bandwidth and site storage. Sure its not blended with OSX but its better value for money.

.Mac is really good for syncing with the iLife software, but I only use it for email...so unless you really want a .mac email account or are going to use it posting pictures online and need POP mail, I would get it, but if not, I would get yahoo mail.

I honestly feel it is very much NOT worth it (as I've expressed in other threads).

You can get real web hosting (aka: hosting with a real .com/.net/.org domain) with much more space for a much cheaper price. Plus, they will give you databases so you can have forums, blogs, etc which .Mac will not let you have. Most will also give you unlimited email accounts for free too.

You can get free 2 gigs of email with GMail - plenty to send and receive pics and video (it's the best email out).

You can use http://www.flickr.com to host your pic library (there's even an iPhoto Plugin that allows you to export any number of pics directly from iPhoto to your free Flickr account).

.Mac is nice in that it integrates so well, but excluding the integration, the price is WAY too high for the actual features it gives.

Then why do it? I don't buy hardware from Apple every year and $99 a year seems like a nice cheap way to support them.

When I first got .Mac there was a lot of free stuff you got with it, that doesn't seem to have continued on. I'll keep it though just for the ease of use, and simple backup / restore / sync'ing stuff it can do.

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